I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constant...inople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

[T]he Congregational minister in a neighboring town definitely stated that 'the same spirit which drove the herd of swine into the... sea drove the Baptists into the water, and that they were hurried along by the devil until the rite was performed.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Neighboring farmers and visitors at White Sulphur drove out occasionally to watch 'those funny Scotchmen' with amused superiority;... when one member imported clubs from Scotland, they were held for three weeks by customs officials who could not believe that any game could be played with 'such elongated blackjacks or implements of murder.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

You will find the most pronounced hatred of other nations on the lowest cultural levels. There is, though, a level where the hatre...d disappears completely and where one so to speak stands above the nations and where one experiences fortune or misfortune of a neighboring country as if they had happened to one's own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Americans living in England are remarkably consistent in their reactions to the English. Most of them are hurt and puzzled because... they were brought up on American neighboring patterns and don't interpret the English ones correctly. In England propinquity means nothing. The fact that you live next door to a family does not entitle you to visit, borrow from, or socialize with them, or your children to play with theirs.... To the best of my knowledge, those who have tried to relate to the English purely on the basis of propinquity seldom if ever succeed. They may get to know and even like their neighbors, but it won't be because they live next door, because English relationships are patterned not according to space but according to social status.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Who knows but this hill may one day be a Helvellyn, or even a Parnassus, and the Muses haunt here, and other Homers frequent the n...eighboring plains?... It was a place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

One would like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children, who openly profe...ssed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon sport. Dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the riverside, from the tales of our seniors sent on horseback in their childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with alewives. At least one memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood creditably at Concord North Bridge. Their captain, a man of piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on parade at the appointed time, but, unfortunately, they went undrilled, except in the manvres of a soldier's wit and unlicensed jesting, that May day; for their captain, forgetting his own appointment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and young, grave and gay, as "The Shad."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »